Peer Vries asks ‘Should we really ReORIENT?’ He never really tells us but instead like my political science professor fifty years ago answers ‘yes and no, with certain reservations’. Fortunately for me, he certainly does not say no with no reservations, but rather yes with some reservations — ‘again I think Frank has truth on his side’. I accept with thanks. Vries does, however, give a careful reading and quite accurate summary rendering of the argument in the book. I wish I could have done as well myself. Then he sets out his legitimate reservations about the same within the universe of discourse that the book sets out, which he also accepts. Unlike so many reviewers, he does not discuss a book that was not written and/or set up only straw men to knock down. For all that, the author and our readers can only be very thankful to Vries, and it behooves the author also to take his critiques and reservations seriously, that is to attempt to use them constructively. Unfortunately in his good effort to be critical, Vries also makes several factually wrong attributions to me, some of which bear correction.

Andre Gunder Frank's latest work, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge what according to him are the received opinions in historiography and social science on the making of the modern world. He does so relentlessly and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, of almost everybody who has ever touched upon the subject. All these misled if not downright misleading scholars are thought to suffer from Eurocentrism. Which of course is a Bad Thing. Frank uses the word to refer to people who profess to tell the history of the world but do so by preponderantly gazing at their European navel, unduly magnifying Europe's uniqueness and role in world history.

From a historiographical point of view, the incident of 1603 has acquired a special significance in the long and tragic history of Chinese massacres on the Philippines. For, when compared to all the rest of the massacres, this is the best chronicled, not only in Spanish, but also in Chinese sources. Moreover, chronicles in both languages include the same facts and are alike in the ordering of events.

In recent years the notion of ‘Eurocentrism’ has become a major theme of modern scholarship, especially in the study of the historical development of the modern world. More and more scholars seem to be coming to the viewpoint that modern historical scholarship has been crippled by the bias of a Eurocentric perspective. Europeans have overstressed their own importance, it is claimed, and have failed to notice that the contributions of non-Europeans to the development of the modern world have been just as great as those of the Europeans. The charge being made really consists of two parts. First, it is claimed that much of the non-European world, Asia in particular, was, economically speaking, at least on a par with Europe in the centuries before AD 1500, and in some ways even more advanced. This claim is then coupled with the assertion that there was nothing especially distinctive about Europe, no particular qualities that set it apart from the rest of the world, nothing that gave it some sort of special dynamic. In this article I wish to argue that these claims are overstated. The first claim has some truth to it, but in and of itself it is highly misleading. In some ways the non-European world was as advanced as Europe in die year 1500, but by that time Europe had become economically different from the rest of the world in a way that would prove decisive for the historical development of die next five centuries. The second claim I believe is manifestly false. Europe indeed had distinctive qualities that set it apart and that gave it a dynamism that was lacking elsewhere. Elsewhere, that is, except for one other part of die world, namely Japan. Japan was surprisingly like Europe in several important ways and it is no accident that Japan is today the most economically and industrially advanced society in die non-western world. One of the most important things I want to do in this paper is to show what features Europe and Japan shared that eventually allowed them to leave the rest of the world behind.

I thank Professor Frank for his swift reaction. I have considered his critiques and reservations seriously and will attempt to use them constructively, just as he did mine. For the sake of convenience I answer his comments in the order in which he has presented them. Space does not permit me to go into all his remarks extensively.

In order to understand the value of any theory, one has to know its origins and background. This is especially true of the various dependency theories, which have always been more than just ‘theories of theorists for theorists’. Dependency theories can only be understood against the background of Latin American politics in the 1960s. Taking this into account, there was an obvious connection between the Cuban Revolution on the one hand, and the unfulfilled expectations of development caused by the failure of modernisation efforts, on the other. The basic idea behind dependency theories is the explanation of the historically unequal relations between Latin America and the North Atlantic economies (Europe and the United States). Dependency theories are essentially attempts to justify government policies to acquire control of national development.

In the historiography of the colonial empires in the nineteenth century, much attention has been paid to the large European powers Britain and France. When the Dutch colonial empire is studied in an international context it is mostly in relation to the British empire. However, little or no attention has been given by scholars to Franco-Dutch colonial relations. This is surprising given the fact that after Britain, France and the Netherlands were the second and third largest colonial empires. Three Franco-Dutch colonial frontiers existed: in South America between French Guyana and Surinam, in the Caribbean on the island of St Martin and in Africa on the Gold Coast. In Asia, where the most important Dutch colony, Indonesia, was located, the French and Dutch did not have neighbouring possessions. Nonetheless, because of its location, Indonesia was highly important for navigation between France and Indo-China. In each of the regions mentioned above, French colonial administrators or private individuals developed plans to extend French territory at the expense of the Dutch: on St Martin from 1843 to 1853, on the Gold Coast from 1867 to 1871, in South America from 1887 to 1891 in Indonesia in 1888. This article will focus on nineteenth century France-Dutch colonial relations and will. address such questions as: what were the motives of the French administrators and how effectively did they exert pressure on the metropolitan government in order to effect their schemes? What was the role of special interest groups? And finally how did the Netherlands react? Being a small European power, how were they able to resist the French?

On 13 April 1650 the young Chief (Opperhoofd) of the Siam factory of Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Merchant (Koopman) Jan van Muijden, arrived at Batavia aboard the flute de Gecroonde Liefde (Crowned Love), with a cargo unusual even by the standards of this thriving stapling port. Aboard were a total of twelve elephants, a gift from the King of Siam and his Mandarins, Oya Sabartiban (Okya Sabartiban) and Oya Berckelang (Okya Phrakhlang), to Governor-General Cornelis van der Lijn and the four Councillors of the Indies present in Batavia at the time, one of whom was the Director-General and second-in-command François Caron. When Van Muijden stepped ashore, he presented Van der Lijn and the Councillors with a letter from Prasat-Thong, the King of Siam, in which the King requested several precious diamond rings for himself and for his Mandarin, Oya Sabartiban, ‘various curiosities from the Netherlands and elsewhere’, military assistance against his rebellious subjects in Cambodia and on the Malay peninsula, and an end to the all-too-frequent molesting by Company ships of Chinese and Portuguese vessels en route to Siam.

Towards the end of his lengthy study of the United States, De la démocratic en Amérique, the early nineteenth-century French liberal Alexis de Tocque-ville wrote:

Il y a aujourd'hui sur la terre deux grands peuples qui […] semblent s'avancer vers le même but: ce sont les Russes et les Anglo-Américains. Leur point de départ est différent, leurs voies sont diverses; néamoins, chacun d'eux semble appelé pas un dessein secret de la Providence à tenir un jour dans ses mains les destinées de la moitié du monde.

Just days after William Howard Taft arrived in the Philippine Islands in early June 1900 to take up his position as the chairman of the five member commission charged with the task of establishing a civilian government for the newly annexed colony, he wrote to J.G. Schmidlapp, an old friend in Ohio, to assure him that he was settling quite comfortably into his exotic surroundings. Taft found the climate in Manila much more agreeable than he had been led to expect was possible in the tropics. The heat, he estimated, was comparable to Cincinnati during the summer months. He was also heartened by the ‘strong, healthy-looking’ young Americans he encountered in the streets of the capital, which he deemed as robust as any back home. But Taft drew a much larger lesson from the apparent ease of his own acclimation and that of his countrymen to the tropical locale. He concluded that though ‘it may be that it is the survival of the fittest […] it is evident that men can live here and be healthy’.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Dutch economy experienced a fresh take-off. Up-to-date steamships plied the shipping routes to the Netherlands East Indies; in the Netherlands the network of railways and canals was greatly expanded; modern insurance companies, commercial banks and other financial institutions were founded. The resultant growing need for external capital led to a new legal form of financing, the joint-stock or limited liability company, and the 1870s and 1880s saw the establishment of a relatively large number of newly founded companies of this type. Generally speaking, these companies represented business activities with a long-standing tradition in Dutch economic life: trade, banking and transportation. The economic take-off was also reflected in the growing number of joint-stock companies pursuing economic activities in colonial Indonesia, often with their headquarters in the Indonesian Archipelago itself. According to J. à Campo the number of such newly founded corporations was more than hundred for each year after 1896, reaching its highest level in 1910, when no less than 326 were founded.

‘Then Mr Johannes Bouchelioen said to me: “Willman, You have wished to travel this far, but here we must now turn back, for no Dutchman, Spaniard, Portuguese or Englishman has ever come any further”. I was fully satisfied with this, and wrote my Name at the top of the Wall in the Cottage, where some Names of Christians were already written. Jedo in Japan lies about 4,800 Miles from Stockholm.’ These words concluded Willman's report of his stay in Edo, but already in the opening sentence of the account of his travels the author had stated that his journey to the Far East was undertaken because of ‘an exceptional Longing and Desire to view foreign Parts by Means of Travel, for which I also had Permission from my Parents.’

The analysis of the French view on the American first commitment in Vietnam depends on the point of view from which the study is made. The bilateral relations background has created different sensitivities on this issue. On the one hand, the United States was an ally of the French government, even if an ambiguous one; on the other hand, a large part of the French opinion, headed by the French communist party, was very suspicious of ‘American imperialism’, in Southeast Asia as well as in Europe. This paper will focus on the official government position, as it emerges from the French archives, especially the financial archives. Indeed, a core issue in this conflict was a financial one.